Under the Sun (59 page)

That is the worst of the news! Otherwise things are very cheery. Your eldest daughter has become a
real
nurse. I am very well looked after: really, our National Health Service for all its faults is a wonder. Where else can you get the benefit of the first rank research brains for free?

I cannot tell you how grateful I am for your support when I was in Zurich. It meant so much to me because I was beginning to panic. I went to Zurich thinking I'd picked up some Indian amoeba. Concentrating so hard on the book I had no idea how ill I was, but I never expected this! I bought a lot of watercolours and was intending to go up into the mountains to paint, but one day I could walk, the next not.

By the time this reaches you, you'll be out of the eye operation.
⁷⁸⁰
As you say, one does steadily fall to bits, but you are so wonderfully brave and seem to take everything in your stride as I must learn to do.

With all my love and a thousand thanks.

Bruce

In an Oxford hospital but as from Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 17 October 1986

 

Dearest Nin,

Lovely to get your letter, Cheered me up a lot. Tisi told me,
very
discreetly that there was someone in your life – and so it should be. I'm delighted for you. This is a scribble written flat on my back – because O misery – I have caught in China an extremely rare (i.e no white man has had it) fungus of the bone marrow which as you know produces red corpuscles. I was in Switzerland trying to recuperate from having
finished
and delivered the book when the thing struck like a whirlwind. E. came out and we flew home just in time. The hospital staff thought it a wonder I lived through the night. But after 5 weeks of drugs, blood transfusion and expert care, there is talk of my going home. But alas, no wintering in Australia! because my blood has to be monitored constantly. So that is the news from this end. Something I never dreamed of, but will survive. E. is being marvellous. Much love, Bruce

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 25 October 1986

 

Dear Charlie,

Good for you! Of course in your hands I thoroughly approve of the BBC adaptation.
⁷⁸¹
The one thing I slightly dread is that they choose readers who are unaware of what a Welsh – and more particularly what a Border accent is. They should be sat down for an hour or so in a pub in Hay-on-Wye and then they'd know for sure. The radio Book at Bedtime for
In Patagonia
was so horrible that I threw my portable radio away and refused to listen to any more instalments. All faked-up, Englishjoking South America. Really chilling!

I'm thrilled to think that I may, after all, see the play. Apparently, in Hereford at least it was sold out . . .
⁷⁸²

As always B

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 3 November 1986

 

Dear Murray,

Where am I? you ask. The fact is I very nearly croaked. In China I have to have caught a very rare fungus of the bone marrow: so rare that it is not described in medical literature and only known to 10 peasants in Western China (now dead) and a single killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia. I am, therefore, an
A1
medical curiosity. I'd been feeling rather low all summer, but not that low and thought, naively, that it was probably some Indian amoeba from the drinking water at Rohet. I finished the book – title
The Songlines
– which, to all the publishers distaste, I insist on calling a novel. I handed in the manuscript and left the very next day for Switzerland, thinking that a combination of mountain air and walks would revive me, and that first rate medicine was always at hand. Fat chance! The next thing I knew, on my first day in Zurich was that I could hardly walk along the street. I found by a miracle the great expert in tropical diseases
⁷⁸³
and the moment he looked at my blood, he exclaimed ‘I cannot understand why you're alive.' Then the fun started. E. flew out and flew me home, to an Oxford hospital, where I was not expected to live through the night. It was not unpleasant. I was hallucinating like mad and was convinced that the view from my window – a car park, a wall and the tops of some trees – were an enormous painting by Paolo Veronese.
⁷⁸⁴
Can we ever escape ‘Art'? Then roughly six weeks of blood transfusions, and a drug that had to be administered intravenously and made me feel terrible. I'm out now; spend most of the day in bed. But the doctors are pleased with me – so far! – and although my legs are still numb from the knees down I can totter about half a mile. But no Australian visit. They want to monitor my blood count once a week for at least a year (they may relent, depending on my ‘progress'). The real test comes when they take off the second anti-fungal drug (a pill, Thank God!). Then we shall really see. Sorry to weary you with this doleful and ego-centric tale, but the self is all I can think of. Reading early tales of Gogol in new edition of the Garnett translation, Chicago Univ press (2 vols). But this morning I've employed a researcher to begin a new work.

Love to M[argaret]. E is wonderful at coping.

As ever B

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [November 1986]

 

My dear Nick,

Yes. Quite a drama! A fungus of the bone marrow that destroyed all my red blood corpuscles. Known only among 10 Chinese peasants and the corpse of a killer whale cast up on the shores of Arabia.
Obviously
, therefore, I caught it in China last winter. I'd no idea I was so ill: because I was finishing the book (now in proof) I blocked it out almost completely and went straight off to Switzerland. The ‘thing' struck 2 days later and, within five I couldn't walk. However, the right drug was found. Be lovely to see you sometime. Do give a call one evening.

Bruce

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | [November 1986]

 

I am very serious about
Bajazet
.
⁷⁸⁶
I believe there's some way that Racine can be made to work for a non-French audience through being declaimed/intoned in the bravura passages with the help of music. Having just finished a new book, I'm relaxing. So you call me, Bruce

9am | Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 13 November 1986

 

Dearest Nin,

An hour ago E. and I were complaining that the Greek (Mount Hymettus, my eye!) honey we had bought at vast expense tasted of precisely nothing, when the postman arrived with your package.
⁷⁸⁷
We had a piece of toast each, in my bedroom,
at home
– and finished our breakfast with something quite delicious. Thank you and bless you. It hardly leaked at all: all we got were sticky fingers when opening it.

I'm at home feeling quite normal and, though I tire quite easily, I had yesterday an eight-hour working day with the copy editor from Cape's. We had a fearful struggle changing back to the original the changes made by the Americans to the copy. They refuse, for example, to admit use of the pronoun ‘which', replacing it invariably by ‘that' – which as we know makes prose so
flat
. Anyway despite my slightly numb and wobbly legs – apparently inevitable when one's legs were reduced to spindles – we went for a short holiday in Cornwall
⁷⁸⁸
– a change for E. who, after bringing me an extra hot meal to the hospital every day for six weeks, was, to say the least, exhausted.

I have got to the stage when I'm fed up with reading and longing to start some new work. I've read Bob H[ughes]'s blockbuster
The Fatal Shore
: it has a kind of Tolstoyan sweep to it. What a tale! As fascinating about the mentality of the English in the 18/19th centuries as of the origins of Oz. Other news is that Werner Herzog intends to start filming the
Viceroy of Ouidah
(title change to
Cobra Verde
) in Feb. The script
deviates
wildly from the book: but so what! Precisely as it should be to make a good film.
⁷⁸⁹

With much love from E. and I, Bruce

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 14 November 1986

 

The BBC
would
want L[ouis] and B[enjamin]'s intimate thoughts – and how corny they must want them to be. The point being that the writer, if he is
not
brought up in that milieu, cannot write about what he cannot know – or occasionally guess at. I don't envy you the task. Am out of hospital and proposing to work today for a couple of hours, as ever Bruce

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 18 November 1986

 

My dearest Derek,

I'm terribly upset for you about your brother. One's hold on life is so extremely tenuous; but when the blow comes, nothing, it seems, can lessen its effect.

I feel
fairly
normal: and was up to cooking blinis last night for a huge pot of caviare that someone brought to the hospital at a time when I was being fed intravenously. We decided to save it for Elizabeth's birthday. The only trouble is my legs which don't function as they should: not surprising in that they were spindles attached to knobbly knees for 2½ months.

Homer End | Ipsden | Oxford | 12 December 1986

 

My dear Dahlinks,

What a lovely surprise! Your letter which has come this morning is about half as long as the telex I got from Simon and Schuster four years back in which my present publisher, Elizabeth Sifton, was accused of
enticing
yours truly away from their incompetent clutches. I also have to report that when, in the summer, obviously a prey to my malady, I turned arsonist and destroyed heaps of old notebooks, card indexes, correspondence, I also found a whole boxful of
your
letters going back to the early 60's, and now doubtless a treasure to be hoarded.

Tell me, did J. J. Klejeman
⁷⁹⁰
really dump all those antiquities in the East River? I'd like to know if, and under what circumstances, he did so. I'm at present at work on a tale – a Hoffmann-like tale set in Prague – in which a collector of Meissen porcelain (a man I met there in 1967)
⁷⁹¹
systematically destroys his collection on his deathbed, so that it will not pass into the hands of the National Museum.

My illness was a dramatic episode. I have always known – from a fortune-teller or from my own instinctive promptings? – that I would be terribly ill in middle-age, and would recover. All summer, while I was putting the final touches to the book, I was obviously sickening, but preferred to put it out of my mind – even though, on a sweltering summer day, I'd be wrapped in shawls beside the Aga scribbling onto a yellow pad. I imagined I'd recover if only I could reach some mountain pastures, and so gaily set off for Switzerland: only to find, next morning, that I couldn't drag myself a hundred yards down the sidewalk. Obviously, something was seriously wrong. Thinking I was prey to some Indian amoeba, I consulted a specialist in tropical medicine, who took one look at my blood count, and, next day, said amiably: ‘I cannot understand why you're alive. You have no red blood corpuscles left.' He failed to make a diagnosis,
⁷⁹²
having run through a complete set of tests; and Elizabeth came to fetch me home in a definitely dying condition. I have a vague recollection of being wheeled to the plane; another, of the ambulance at London airport and then a blank. By the time I got to Oxford I was not expected to last the night. I did incidentally have the ‘dark night experience', followed by the Pearly Gates. In my delirium I had visions of being in a colourful and vaguely medieval court where women offered me grapes on tazzas. At one point I called to Elizabeth, ‘Where's King Arthur? He was here a minute ago.'

Anyway, although I was on life support, they still couldn't find the cause until, on the fourth day, the young immunologist rushed into my room and said ‘Have you, in the past five years, been in a bats' cave? We think you've got a fungus of the bone marrow, which starts off growing on bat shit.' Yes. I had been in bat caves, in Java and in Australia. But when they grew the fungus, as one grows a culture for yoghurt, it was not mine after all. The most expert mycologists were consulted: samples were flown to the U.S., and the answer, which finally emerged, was that I had, indeed, a fungus of the marrow, but one which was known
only
from the corpse of a killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia and from ten healthy Chinese peasants, all of whom had died. Had I been consorting with killer-whales? Or with Chinese peasants? ‘Peasants,' I said decisively. Indeed, we had. Last December we were in Western Yunnan, following the traces of the Austro-American botanist, Joseph Rock, whose book
The Kingdom of the Na-Khi
was admired by Ezra Pound.
⁷⁹³
We went to peasant feasts, slept in peasant houses
⁷⁹⁴
, inhaled the dust of peasant winnowing; and it must be in Yunnan that I inhaled the particles of fungal dust, which set the malady in motion. I lost half my weight; came out in lumps and scabs, and looked entirely like the miniature of Akbar's courtier in the Bodleian whose name I've forgotten.
⁷⁹⁵
I had a fearsome drug administered on the drip constantly for six weeks. I had blood transfusions, and in the end I made a rather startling recovery: at least, one which my doctors did not expect. It'll mean a change in one's life, though. Apparently, one can't ever quite get rid of a fungus like this, so I shall be on pills indefinitely; will have to report from time to time, and
not
alas go travelling into dangerously exotic places. The last stipulation I fully intend to ignore. In the meantime, rather than face the sodden gloom of an English winter, we are setting out for Grasse where we have borrowed a flat and where I hope to bash out my tale of the Czechoslovakian porcelain collector.